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Notes
1. The same strategy is used in Toni Morrison's Beloved (Citation1988), in which the silenced black female slaves are imaginatively reconstructed in a narrative as a countersite for articulation.
2. Particularly from her first two collections, Crossing the Peninsula (1980) and especially No Man's Grove (1985), subsequently collected together in Monsoon History (1994).
3. I also admit that the poems discussed in this essay are precisely selected to support my argument; I hope to show that it is possible to read them as unconsciously related to Lim's ‘search’ for ‘mothers’, a point that will be substantially discussed towards the end of the essay.
4. For further elaboration, refer to Harriet Evans's essay, ‘Past, Perfect or Imperfect: Changing Images of the Ideal Wife’, Citation2002.
5. Kaja Silverman, Citation1992.
6. No Man's Grove, p. 14; Monsoon History, p. 166.
7. This theory is, of course, relevant to the mother-son relationship as well. Hélène Cixous (Citation1986), for example, demonstrates how the poetic prose of writers such as Genet powerfully reflects what she terms l’écriture feminine, a mode of writing that suggests the influence of the feminine on the writer's style and expression. This view, when read against Kristeva's notion, suggests parallel theoretical frameworks between the two theorists with regards to ‘feminine language’.
8. The privileging of sons by traditional Chinese families more or less relegates daughters to faceless, nameless identities. See discussion of the poem ‘Pantoun for Chinese Women’, below.
9. No Man's Grove, p. 33; Monsoon History, p. 147.
10. No Man's Grove, p. 63; Monsoon History, p. 6.
11. Lest one should argue that Lim may perhaps be writing about a dated form of female repression, one that is no longer practised in our modern, enlightened world, it should be noted that many women—in both first and third worlds—continue to live marginalised, brutalised lives on various levels. Extreme forms of female victimisation (female infanticide, certain practices of suttee) may be outlawed, yet in less extravagant but equally repressive ways, women continue to bear the cruel weight of their interpellated gendered positions. Indeed, Lim is not unaware of this, as poems like ‘Science Fiction’ (a poem about abortion) and ‘Mannequins’ (which highlights the myth of beauty that violently constructs many modern women) would attest.
12. The pantoun is a Malay verse form; each stanza comprises four lines of between eight to twelve syllables, and has a very rigid, repetitive rhyme scheme.
13. Crossing the Peninsula and Other Poems, p. 53; Monsoon History, p. 73.
14. Eddie Tay, in his essay ‘Hegemony, National Allegory, Exile: The Poetry of Shirley Lim’ (2005), extends this patriarchy to include colonialism.
15. The Peranakan are Chinese whose lineage can be traced back to the Malaccan Sultanate in the fifteenth century and who have subsequently become assimilated into the Malay culture. For a detailed, if rather sexist, exploration of the Peranakan people and culture, see Chee Beng Tan's study, The Baba of Melaka (1988). In the case of a woman (known as a ‘nyonya’ in the Peranakan society), anthropologist Khoo Joo Ee writes that she is a ‘highly domesticated creature’ (Khoo, The Straits Chinese, Citation1996, p. 122); as a girl, she must remain ‘ignorant of the outside world’, confined more or less all the time to the home, and is thought not to be ‘inquisitive’ (122). When she marries, she will be trained ‘to cope with a variety of household and social tasks … a managing director par excellence’ of the domestic realm (122). And, of course, as a mother she must bear a male offspring to finally secure for herself the position of the respected matriarch of her husband's household (123); failure to do so would entail her relegation to a secondary position if (or usually, when) the husband weds another.
16. Lim, ‘Semiotics’, p. 163.
17. No Man's Grove, p. 23; Monsoon History, p. 14.
18. Monsoon History, published in 1994, is a collected work, comprising poems from her first three collections.
19. Prior to the 1998 collection, her poems also reveal strong antipathy towards Americanism. See, for example, ‘An Immigrant Looks at Whitman’ (No Man's Grove, p. 76) and ‘I Defy You’ (Modern Secrets, p. 114).
20. What the Fortune Teller Didn't Say, p. 11.
21. For Irigaray, mimicry (or mimesis) is the deliberate assumption of the feminine role, ‘[w]hich means already to convert a form of subordination into an affirmation, and thus to begin to thwart it’ (Irigaray, Citation1985, p. 76).
22. What the Fortune Teller Didn't Say, p. 3.
23. The fortune teller has a bamboo container into which money is placed as payment after one's fortune is told.